Stedmen’s Medical Dictionary describes capsaicin as “a colorless irritant phenolic amide C₁₈H₂₇NO₃ that is found in various capsicums and that gives hot peppers their hotness .” The dictionary does NOT go on to say that when you’ve got capsaicin in it’s “colorless” state, the crystals are pretty much weapons-grade irritants. It’s the active ingredient in pepper spray, after all.

Peppers are typically measured on the Scoville scale, where you puree the pepper, and then dilute with water until you can’t taste the spice anymore. There are less subjective mechanisms now for generating the numbers, but to give you an example, Tabasco sauce rates around 2500, which means you have to add 2500 parts of water to one part Tabasco before it’s not spicy any longer. That may seem pretty hot, but Police grade pepper spray rates around 2,000,000. Pure capsaicin is up around 5.3 million, and apparently there are a couple of mutations of the molecule like Nordihydrocapsaicin which are even hotter.

Like it matters. When you’re up in the millions, capsaicin is a munition, not a foodstuff.

I love spicy food. I’ve got a bottle of hot sauce that rates between 40,000 and 75,000 Scoville — it’s called “Blair’s Sudden Death Sauce”– and last night I used it on the last of our leftover curried rice.

A word on capsaicin’s effects: if you get enough in your mouth, and it doesn’t take much at all, the pain and heat receptors shut down, but not before giving you a tremendous jolt. You get some endorphins as well. This is why people like extremely spicy food — there’s an endorphin rush associated with tricking your oral cavity into believing that you’ve eaten a live coal. Once you’ve had this experience, there is a gating effect, which means you can fire things up much hotter next time without feeling like you’re going to die.

So… about a week ago I was over at ‘s house, and I spread (yes, SPREAD) some Scoville 60k on a quesadilla already loaded with green chiles.

Last night’s curry was a non-event. I got four drops and a couple of dried-up bottleneck chunks into maybe a cup and a half of curried rice (with walnuts, apples, raisins, and green peppers… yum!) and sat down to watch a movie. I plowed through the rice like there was nothing on it. Sure, I could taste the heat. Yes, I got that endorphin kick. But there was no pain. This means I’ve successfully gated the nerves in my cake hole down several notches, to the point where I can eat Weapons of Mouth Destruction with relative impunity.

The sad thing… nobody else in my home likes spicy foods the way I do. We prepared that curry as mild as could be for the kids, and they STILL complained that it was too spicy. Thus, I’m relegated to doctoring leftovers for my capsaicin fix.

A little insight for you.

I tuned in to APOD a moment ago (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html) and the article was on the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023. There was a link from that article to another article about PAH molecules forming in space.

My first exposure to the term PAH was in Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac, in which the main character is frying bacon and proclaims that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are his favorite flavor of carcinogen. The phrase has stuck with me. Recently I was reading up on PAH molecules elsewhere to try and figure out just how much of a cancer risk the backyard grilling is. Answer: not much. I’m at about 10 times higher risk for all the sunbathing I did as a kid.

This brings us to my recent mole removal, during which the doctor zapped things off of my back, and I commented that the smell of burnt me was not the tasty polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon smell of backyard grilling, but more like the smell of successfully lighting the grill after unsuccessfully lighting it and flooding the chamber with gas (e.g. the smell of burnt me).

So I’m reading this link about PAH in space, and all my current knowledge of PAH gets re-indexed in my head around the concept of stars pumping out molecules long considered the by-product of burnt organics. It then occurs to me that space-borne carcinogens have an infinitesimal cancer danger compared to the radiation blazing off of the star that made them, and I re-ruminate upon all that vanity-motivated sunburning I did as a teenager in Florida.

I’ve read other things today, too. In fact, I think I’ll go read some more of them now.

–Howard

Props, kudos, and big shout out to John Kerry for sacrificing one principle in favor of another. America needed a decisive election, and Kerry backed down from last night’s “win at all costs” stance (which he wisely had his running mate project as if on his behalf) and allowed that feeling of decisiveness to begin to take hold.

The “anybody but Bush” camp made a serious mistake early on: they failed to understand why half the country (just OVER half the country, in point of fact) still supported President Bush. This practice of despising the incumbent was carried to a fatal extreme. After all, if you can’t believe anybody would still vote for Bush, how can you hope to convince them NOT to?

The Bush campaign understood all too well what THEY were up against, and they played on that very masterfully.

I can see why folks would vote against Bush. I can even see why they’d vote for Kerry. I understand those arguments, and I sympathize with them to an extent just SHORT of the extent where I’d actually VOTE for them.

The thing Bush has going for him that so few American Presidents have had is the willingness to make decisions that are extremely unpopular.

Argue all you want about WHY they’re unpopular (just not HERE, please… see below). The fact that he sticks to his principles and does things that alienate him from half the electorate and many of the World’s leaders is something that a lot of mature voters actually LIKE. In Kerry those voters saw more of the Capitol Hill compromising that has been the hallmark of every presidency since Nixon (including Reagan and GB senior). Clinton had a great “do what we have to at all costs” streak in him, but when his party got punished in Congress in 1994, pressure from his own party had him backing away from the things he really wanted to accomplish. Personally, I’m glad he did, because I disagreed pretty strongly with most of it, but I understood then and now the necessity of doing unpopular things on principle.

Maybe I’m projecting my own open-mindedness on others with similar party leanings, because I think that most of those who voted for Bush understood why people didn’t like him. I could be wrong. I’m not trying to foster a discussion of issues, here, and I’m certainly not trying to start a flame war. I’m concerned, as Kerry said he was in his concessionary call to President Bush, over the division in the nation today. Part of the problem is that a large number of us not only DON’T understand other points of view, we act as if we don’t WANT to.

I’ve said it before — be nice to each other. Seek to understand why your fellows, your neighbors, and even your enemies think the way they do. Only then will you be able to affect any sort of change.

In a previous journal entry I wondered why nobody had yet called the election 281 to 257 in favor of GWB. For the record, I wasn’t saying they SHOULD have called it… I was wondering what I was missing as to why they HADN’T called it yet.

Well, it looks like my count at the time was as accurate as anybody else’s STILL is, so it’s a good thing I didn’t stay up for more results. Unless you live in a cave, or read my blog before reading important stuff, you know that the GOP has claimed victory, 286 to 252 (GW gained Nevada, which I thought he’d lose), and it’s going to take what looks like two weeks’ worth of counting (oh PLEASE no recounting, please oh please) before the Democrats allow that claim to be substantiated, or successfully refute it. Hey, who knows? There could be a huge bloc of Kerry votes in those uncounted 1%. If I were a voter in Iowa, New Mexico, or Ohio, I’d certainly want all those votes counted.

Now, as to where votes REALLY count: local measures! Here in Utah the Sales Tax bond I wanted to see defeated appears to be losing by a close margin. All three constitutional amendments passed: The Legislature can call itself into an impeachment session, Public universities can accept stock in private businesses spun off from their research, and (in the most controversial measure) marriage will only be between a man and a woman, with no other union allowed to have the same benefits as traditional marriages. I fully expect that last one to get challenged in Federal Court, where Utah attorneys will join attorneys from 10 other U.S. states wrangling the mess of State’s Rights vs Freedom of Religion. Whatever comes of that, I’m sure it won’t be boring.

The one place where I simply couldn’t find a candidate to vote for: Nuclear Waste Storage. SOMEBODY has to store this stuff. Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico are all great places for it. If we could agree to store it then maybe someday we could actually put nuclear plants in place to end our huge dependence on foreign oil. Oh, and lower the costs of energy, sparking a boom in a number of industries. But there was no candidate anywhere on the ballots who had come out publicly in favor of storing the stuff in Utah.

What this means is that I need to continue to be involved. I need to write the folks who were elected, and let them know that THIS Utah citizen is not spooked by irrational arguments about nukes.

*sigh*

I could have used a few hours more sleep. I’ll write my congressmen about THAT, too.

–Howard